Aristocratic figure.

Drawing, pen and brown ink, 17 x 10 cm, vellum paper, signed at lower right "Rossi" (sm. tear at lower left edge).

Under passe-partout and frame (not studied outside frame).

A proud man in 18th-c. clothes. Lucius Rossi (1823-1913) was an Italian portrait painter who worked in Paris. He first followed artistic training in Rome’s Academy of San Luca. Then he was strongly influenced by the imagination and the emotion of the Romantic painters, and also charmed by the technique of the Spanish artist Mariano Fortuny. He stayed in Rome between 1857 and 1859. Although only a few details are known about his life, we know that he left Italy to settle in Paris in 1867, and began to work as a designer for magazines.